This is the blog of David M. Raab, marketing technology consultant and analyst. Mr. Raab is Principal at Raab Associates Inc. The blog is named for the Customer Experience Matrix, a tool to visualize marketing and operational interactions between a company and its customers.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Research sponsored by the Raab Associates Institute has recently uncovered the earliest known marketing technology – a cave painting that promotes a local barbecue restaurant. Key selling points included freshness of the meat and how excited the kids would be. Archeologists disagree as to whether they also promised live music every Saturday night.

Stone age marketers could invest with little risk that their tools would become obsolete. Today’s marketing technologists don’t have that luxury. Think of it this way: at any point in the past thirty years, an architecture built around the leading technology of the day would have been utterly obsolete ten (and probably five) years later:

The obvious conclusion is that an architecture built on today’s leading technology, mobile, has no chance of surviving the next decade. This realization calls for a change from planning around specific technologies to planning around change itself.

In one word, the solution to this problem is modularity: build an architecture that lets you replace obsolete components without stopping the entire system from operating. I’ve just released a white paper, sponsored by Tealium, with specific suggestions for how to make this happen. You can download it here. We’ll be presenting the paper and related research in a Webinar tomorrow (Thursday) at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time. You can register here for the Webinar. I hope you’ll join us!